Research
Research
Public programs in lower-income countries are increasingly delivered through digital payments, but rural economic life still runs on cash. Households must convert cash into digital money to pay, or a digital transfer into cash to spend it, and either conversion requires a trip to an agent. We show that this last-mile problem is costly enough to weaken policy effectiveness. In rural Togo, the transport cost alone of reaching an agent amounts to 19% of what the median customer pays each month for pay-as-you-go solar electricity. Exploiting the staggered rollout of a nationwide solar subsidy, we find its effect on adoption is nearly three times larger where an agent is within walking distance. A subsequent government-led agent expansion initiative raises adoption by as much as this differential, consistent with complementarity and isolating the role of payment access from potential confounders. The same friction, now on the cash-out side, attenuates the effects of Togo’s emergency cash transfers, delivered digitally through the same agents. Since operators place agents by transaction volume and public programs often target underserved, low-volume areas, this wedge between private and social returns suggests a role for public investment in payment infrastructure.
Low performance on high-stakes school-leaving examinations is a central bottleneck to secondary school completion in low-income countries. We experimentally evaluate two margins through which exam performance may improve in impoverished rural settings: psychological activation through role model exposure and access to a shareable educa- tional technology — portable solar lamps. In the two weeks preceding Togo’s secondary school graduation exams, 320 rural students were randomised to watch either an inspira- tional film or a placebo; a subset additionally received a lamp. Leveraging baseline social network data and estimators that account for interference, we identify substantial direct and spillover effects of lamp access. Students assigned a lamp, as well as peers in their pre-existing social network, increase strong pass rates — the threshold conferring auto- matic certification and university eligibility — by approximately 11 percentage points. Role model exposure alone has no effect on strong pass rates but raises marginal pass rates by a comparable magnitude; we find no evidence of complementarity. We document that lamp access expanded study networks, validating the causal chain from lamp provision through peer studying to improved performance, while the mechanisms underlying the role model effect are less precisely identified, with suggestive evidence of strengthened self-efficacy.